Features

Summer’s turning out to be another scorcher, beckoning with promises of endless sun-kissed days filled with music festivals. There’s always an embarrassment of riches on display, but the ones brimming most with energy and enthusiasm, abuzz with imagination and excitement— the most toe-tapping and hum-inducing — seem to be the open-air concerts.

Everyone loves them: families with boisterous young children, courting couples, friends exploring new music, aficionados revisiting old favourites, thrill-seeking tourists seeking out novel experiences. And then there are the homing pigeons, the ones who return season after season, the ones who think they know all the best-kept open secrets, and very often want to share them!

This column is being launched in that spirit of sharing, of shining the spotlight on the obvious, and the not-so-very obvious: on the role that programming plays in the myriad musical discoveries that everyone shares, and the personalities that shape the journeys we all take. These are the people who work tirelessly behind the scenes to create a very public experience. They might even be people with very public personae or, equally, very private ones. What they all share, unequivocally, is a sense of passion, an infectious enthusiasm and the ability to get things done.

When you head down to David Pecaut Square for this year’s Luminato festival you will notice something new — and altogether different. An immense blue ribbon will sweep overhead from one end of the square to the other. Along its course it will wind around the stage and make its way past a group of balletic windsocks.

After the square was renamed last year in memory of the co-founder of the festival, it was officially designated as the festival ub. Thus inspired, Luminato inaugurated a program of architectural installations in the square. The architect Jack Diamond, of Diamond Schmitt Architects, was selected to create this initial design, which is being called Windscape.

If you have a desire to sing, you’d be hard-pressed not to find a place for your voice these days. I’ve been studying community music in Toronto, and my sneak peek at The WholeNote’s 2012 Canary Pages confirmed my own sense of the many opportunities open to singers of all ages, abilities and interests. And that’s just what’s listed in these pages. If the Canary Pages are the tip of a singing iceberg, then there are likely hundreds of places to sing in Southern Ontario. And by all accounts, Ontarians are singing.

Here’s a riddle for you. By day they are lawyers, paramedics, marketing mavens, music students, teachers, bus drivers, office managers, dentists and various retirees. By night, they transform themselves into gypsies, peasants, soldiers, courtesans, nuns, prisoners, factory workers, heavenly angels and the demimondaine. Who are they? And the answer is, a typical opera chorus.

That they are indispensible to an opera is a given. “The chorus represents the community or society that the principal characters inhabit,” explains stage director Tom Diamond. And Opera Hamilton chorister Dorothy O’Halloran adds: “We are part of the on-going story. We react to the main characters. In fact, we collectively are a character in the opera.”

In our February 2011 issue, The WholeNote’s publisher David Perlman interviewed, for our cover story, the seven winners of the 2011 Toronto Sinfonietta Concerto Competition. These talented teenagers had a variety of musical backgrounds, but shared a common focus, drive and passion for performing classical music.